Tuesday, January 27, 2015

Top Four Anti-Inflammatory Spices

A
group of researchers at the University of Florida, Gainesville and
Pennsylvania State set up a brilliant experiment. We’ve known that ounce
per ounce, herbs and spices have some of the greatest antioxidant
activities known. But that’s only ever been tested in a test tube.
Before we can ask if an herb or spice has real health benefits, it is
first necessary to determine whether it is bioavailable — whether the
active ingredients are even absorbed. This had never been done, until
now.

The researchers could have taken the easy route and just
measured the change in antioxidant level in one’s bloodstream before and
after consumption, but the assumption that the appearance of
antioxidant activity in the blood is an indication of bioavailability
has a weakness. Maybe more gets absorbed than we think but doesn’t show
up on antioxidant tests because it gets bound up to proteins or cells.
So the researchers attempted to measure physiological changes in the
blood. They were interested in whether absorbed compounds would be able
to protect white blood cells from an oxidative or inflammatory
injury—whether herb and spice consumption would protect the strands of
our DNA from breaking when attacked by free radicals. I cover the DNA
findings in my video, Spicing Up DNA Protection.
They also wondered if the consumption might alter cellular inflammatory
responses in the presence of a physiologically relevant inflammatory
insult. What does this all mean?

The researchers took a bunch of
people and had each of them eat different types of spices for a week.
There were many truly unique things about this study, but one was that
the quantity of spices that study subjects consumed was based on the
usual levels of consumption in actual food. For example, the oregano
group was given a half teaspoon a day—a practical quantity that people
might actually eat once in a while. At the end of the week, they drew
blood from the dozen or so people they had adding, for example, black
pepper to their diets that week, and compared the effects of their blood
to the effects of the blood of the dozen subjects on cayenne, or cinnamon,
or cloves, or cumin. They had about ten different groups of people
eating about ten different spices. Then they dripped their plasma (the
liquid fraction of their blood) onto human white blood cells in a Petri
dish that had been exposed to an inflammatory insult. The researchers
wanted to pick something really inflammatory,
so they chose oxidized cholesterol (which is what we’d get in our
bloodstream after eating something like fried chicken. If oxidized
cholesterol is a new concept for you, please check out its role in heart disease progression in my video Arterial Acne).
So they jabbed the white blood cells with oxidized cholesterol and
measured how much tumor necrosis factor (TNF) they produced in response.

TNF
is a powerful inflammatory cytokine, infamous for the role it plays in
autoimmune attacks like inflammatory bowel disease. Compared to the
blood of those who ate no spices for a week, black pepper was unable to
significantly dampen the inflammatory response. What about any of the
other spices? The following significantly stifled the inflammatory
response:

cloves

ginger

rosemary

turmeric

And
remember, they weren’t dripping the spices themselves on these human
white blood cells, but the blood of those who ate the spices. So the
results represents what might happen when cells in our body are exposed
to the levels of spices that circulate in our bloodstream after normal
daily consumption—not megadoses in some pill. Just the amount that makes
our spaghetti sauce, pumpkin pie, or curry sauce taste good.

There are drugs that can do the same thing. Tumor necrosis factors are such major mediators of inflammation
and inflammation-related diseases that there are TNF-blocking drugs on
the market for the treatment of inflammatory diseases such as
osteoarthritis, inflammatory bowel disease, psoriasis, and ankylosing
spondylitis, which collectively rake in more than $20 billion a year
($15,000–$20,000 per person per year). At that price, the side effects
better be hugs and rainbows. But no, the drugs carry a so-called “black
box warning” because they can cause things like cancer and heart
failure. If only there was a cheaper, safer solution.

The spice
curcumin, the yellow pigment in turmeric, is substantially cheaper and
safer, but does it work outside of a test tube? There’s evidence that it
may help in all of the diseases for which TNF blockers are currently
being used. So with health-care costs and safety being such major
issues, this golden spice turmeric may help provide the solution.